Updated old unsupported 2009 MacBook Pro to 10.13 High Sierra. Works perfectly!

[Eug]

Thanks to dosdude1 and friends, I was able to update my ancient 2009 MacBookPro5,5 13" to 10.13 High Sierra Beta 9 (which may be the last beta before the GM).

http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/

Everything works perfectly. Video card, WiFi, trackpad, everything. It's somewhat slower than my 2017 MacBook 12" Core m3, but my MBP only has 4 GB RAM and an old 128 GB Samsung 840 EVO on a SATA II connection I believe. My Core m3 has a faster CPU, 256 GB PCIe SSD, and 16 GB RAM. However, despite being noticeably slower than the MacBook, it's still responsive enough to be very usable, and because of that I'm contemplating updating it to 8 GB RAM, even though I don't use it much. It would make a good hand-me-down when the kids get older.

It can now recognize HEVC files in QuickTime and HEIC images in Preview too. 4K HEVC is a slideshow though of course, but that's OK for an 8 year old machine.

The install process was mostly smooth, but the issue I ran into had to do with my USB drive. The install process began properly with the first USB drive I used, but once the machine was updated to 10.13, the machine would no longer see the USB drive in the list of bootable drives at startup. IOW, I couldn't boot off the USB drive again to apply the post-install patches to get 10.13 to work. So I had a machine that couldn't boot the OS installed, and that couldn't boot the boot USB drive either. Stuck in no man's land. However, the solution to this was easy. I just put the installer and patcher on a different USB drive, and the MBP recognized that one just fine.

 

[Eug]

To get rid of some junk on my machine from my previous Sierra install, I tried a clean install to an APFS drive. While it works fine, the boot process initially has a verbose mode, spewing out text during the first part of the boot process. Also, there is no recovery partition available. Also, the boot APFS drive simply says "EFI Boot" with no volume name. This all looks very un-Mac like.

So I re-formatted the SSD, and re-installed High Sierra again with HFS+. Now the install looks like a completely supported Mac, as before: No verbose boot mode, and the recovery partition is there and is fully bootable. Also, boot partition is properly named.

I turned on TRIM for my Samsung 840 EVO and it's all good. Well, except for the fact that I'm hitting the swap because of my 4 GB RAM sometimes even with relatively light usage.

 

[Oyeve]

Nice! I'm gonna try it on my mid-2009 MBP!

 

[Eug]

Nice! I'm gonna try it on my mid-2009 MBP!

The process is as follows:

1) Make the USB installer drive with dosdude1's application.
2) Boot your Mac off of it.
3) Run the macOS installer.
4) Reboot to the USB boot drive.
5) Install the patches.
6) Reboot to High Sierra on the Mac.
7) Activate TRIM in the terminal if you have an SSD.

Note that the patcher has a drop down list of machines supported. When you choose a machine, it checks off the required patches. However, for some reason the default settings including patching of the boot partition and not the recovery partition. Since the High Sierra installer will create / update the recovery partition regardless if you want it or not, you may as well patch that too to get a functional recovery partition. (I also checked off the box to get compatibility for Apple's 10/100 Ethernet dongle, since I happen to have one of those dongles, although it's not really necessary since the machine has a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port anyway.)

 

[Eug]

Running the GM version of High Sierra now.

As mentioned, overall speed with this 2009 MacBook Pro is not great, which is no surprise as it only gets about 2600 with Geekbench 4 multi-core, roughly 1/4 the score of the latest iPhone.

However, the most important metric to me here is that the speed is very similar on 10.13 High Sierra as it is on 10.11 El Capitan, at least with 8 GB RAM and SSD. (I'm not sure if there would be a more noticeable difference speed with say 4 GB RAM and a spinning HD, but this scenario is already way too slow on El Capitan so it's moot.) So you're not really losing anything by going to High Sierra from El Capitan. Yeah, something like 10.6 Snow Leopard feels much faster, but 10.6 is essentially useless in 2017.

This machine makes a fine guest machine, and will be useful as a machine for my kid even a couple of years from now when she needs one for school. Having High Sierra on it will give it at least another 3-4 years of usable life I think.

 

[Eug]

I saw a fully functional 2008 MacBook Unibody Aluminum MacBook non-Pro on Kijiji for cheap so I snatched it up, for under US$150. It had only 2 GB RAM and HD and an old version of OS X, and IMO it was completely unusable in that configuration. I don't understand how anyone would be able to tolerate using such an old machine, but I guess that's why it was being sold that cheap.

This machine is MacBook5,1, and is the near identical precursor to my MacBookPro5,5 above. This aluminum MacBook was too expensive for the market, so basically Apple went back to plastic, and took this aluminum one and added a backlit keyboard and Firewire and called it a Pro. The internals are pretty much the same otherwise. That meant that the 4 GB I took out of the Pro was compatible with this one, and also, I had an extra SSD from the old plastic MacBook4,1 I was replacing. So now I have a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz MacBook with SSD and 4 GB RAM, updated also to High Sierra. Works great too. My wife will be pleased with this machine since it's completely up-to-date software wise. Her old MacBook4,1 was stuck on OS X 10.7.5, which meant that we couldn't install the latest versions of Safari, Chrome, or Firefox.